Visiting colleges can be exhilarating. You get a glimpse of campus life and the autonomy you’ll have as a student. You’ll gain a preview of what it means to move beyond the standard high school curriculum and pursue academic studies of your own choosing. And you get a feel for the way that a college’s character is shaped by numerous factors: its location, architecture, student population, and other traits that define its academic and cultural life. On paper, a school might have everything you’re looking for, but you might discover it doesn’t feel right to you. It’s important to be attentive to your reactions, while acknowledging that your perspective can shift.
Once you’ve completed your first group of school visits, you can take a deep breath. From here on, the college exploration process can be a lot of fun. You’ve developed a sense of what’s most important to you to see on other campuses—the library? the student center? the gym facilities? lecture halls? dorm rooms? social spaces?—in order to make a smart decision about applications and acceptances down the road.
Now that the visits are over, it’s time to process what you saw and heard.
Big tip for students
As soon as possible after each campus visit, take notes about your experience and your impressions of the school. This way you’ll remember your reactions and can use this information later when you decide which schools to apply to. As time passes, your memories can become less distinct, and if you visit numerous schools on the same trip, your experiences can blur together. How you feel when you return home—or weeks or even months later—will likely be different than when you first set foot on campus. With time and distance, feelings can change—and you may not fully remember everything you saw and what you felt.
How to evaluate your experience at each school
1. Review our Campus Visit Checklist ADD LINK which you used for your visits. You’ll be able to see how you felt at the time you visited, and hopefully you jotted some additional notes giving yourself even more information.
2. Try to picture yourself back on campus. How did you feel at the time and how do you feel now? Can you articulate the difference, if they are indeed different? What did you like about the school then, and how have your feelings changed (if they did)?
3. Download and use our Evaluation Form ADD LINK to keep track of the schools you’re serious about. This way, you can compare them all in one place. Consider the criteria we’ve listed—including high and low points of the tour, school size, and more—and add any other considerations that you think will be helpful for your decision. For example, if you’re a biology student, did the laboratories look like they were cutting-edge or out-of-date? As a prospective theater major, do you think the facilities would suit the performances you’d like to do? Or if you want to get involved in intramural sports, was there a particular team that matches your interests?
4. You can develop a numbering system, say from 1–5, that allows you to give the school a rating. Since this is your personal system of assessment, you have free rein in deciding what criteria to use. The small amount of time you take to record this information will make your future decisions better-informed as well as more strategic and efficient; you’ll save loads of time. Your notes and all of the “thinking” you do will help you fill out your applications, particularly when the various schools ask you to write about “Why our college?” and “What is special to you about our university?” By preparing so much ahead of time, you are making the process of the applications easier for yourself – and you are figuring out what matters to you in a school.
Evaluating and rating schools will be helpful in whittling down your list to the schools you want to apply to. You don’t want to submit 18 applications because you weren’t able to establish your preferences, or you don’t remember your impressions. Taking notes immediately after your visit will help you to narrow down your choices to a manageable—and appropriate—number of applications.
More things to do post-visit
If you haven’t already, sign up for each college’s email list and follow them on social media. Open the emails you receive. Like the posts you see. These small actions demonstrate your interest in the school, and that demonstrated interest may factor into your application profile.
Here are the links again to our Campus Visit Checklist LINK and Evaluation Form. LINK